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Everybody’s got a story that could break your heart. Just ask Amanda Marshall.

The wildly popular singer who set the music scene on fire back in 1995 hasn’t been heard from much in recent years, which is why her concert at Casino Rama on Nov. 5 is an occasion to look forward to.

And what’s behind that absence is Marshall’s own particular heartbreak. Not the conventional kind, from a busted romance or a trip down the substance-abuse trail. None of that for Marshall.

No, her tragedy lies with firing her management in 2002, which then triggered a battle with her label and resulted in a series of legal actions that still aren’t settled today and she isn’t able to discuss.

“Let me just say,” she begins in that wood-smoke voice of hers, “There are a lot of bands and performers whose careers are permanently derailed by spectacularly bad management. They just seem to vanish and one day you ask, ‘Hey, what happened to them?’ ”

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But that’s the last stormy weather sentiment to pass Marshall’s lips. Once the air has been cleared, the sun comes out and she definitely has a bright and shiny personality.

Judging to what she says, she’s been like that ever since she was born in Toronto on Aug. 29, 1972.

“I was really, really, really enthusiastic as a kid. I was up for anything. I was hugely into music and theatre. I was a big musical theatre kid, I loved reading.” She pauses. “Okay, I wasn’t too much into sports!” A burst of laughter.

She happily recalls her elementary school days “at the Montessori School on Sheldrake Blvd. My friends came from all over the city.”

When she was 10, her family moved to Halifax. “It was the first time I was the new kid at school. And I was the only new kid.”

And there was an added factor. Marshall is the child of a white father and a black mother. That had never been an issue in Toronto. Things changed in Halifax.

“It was the first time I ever had to deal with it,” she says with surprise in her voice. “It wasn’t that awful, but it was still people saying things, calling me names, leaving me out. I’d never known any of that.”

She chuckles. “Well, I had known the food differences. Not only did my Mom cook food from the Islands, but she was a health freak back then. I never got a chocolate birthday cake; I got a carob one. And when I went to other kids’ houses I was very covetous of things like Cheez Whiz that I’d find in their refrigerators.”

Marshall survived the years in Halifax, came back to Toronto to finish high school, but decided not to go to college. “In my mind, I had already committed myself to a career in music. I had done that a long time ago.”

So she set out at the age of 17, “working as a telephone operator by day and doing gigs by night.” That’s where she met the late, great blues musician Jeff Healey, who took her on as his protégée and brought her on tour with him.

“My father saw how fast I was moving and he asked me, just once, ‘Are you sure this is really what you want to do with your life?’ but I didn’t listen. When you’re that age and doing what you love, you’re just flying.”

There’s been a generally accepted story that Marshall turned down a contract with a major record company when it was offered to her in 1991, but now, nearly 20 years later, she’s anxious to set things straight.

“I did actually have a deal with Columbia,” she now admits, “but it became increasingly clear to me after signing with them that they didn’t know what to do with me and I didn’t know what to do for them, so we agreed to go our separate ways.”

But four years later she signed with Epic Records and her debut album, Amanda Marshall. broke big, really big, with six Top 40 songs.

Asked if she knew what had happened to her, she reaches back into her memory for a specific incident.

“I was doing my first promo tour, sitting in a hotel lobby with a label representative, signing CDs. He was telling me how well things were going and asked me ‘Aren’t you excited?’ and even though I told him I was, he must have seen past my words and he shook his head. ‘You don’t really have any idea what’s going on here, do you? You don’t know how big you’re going to be.’”

And she didn’t. To Marshall, her sudden fame meant “that I got to do two things I loved doing: travelling and singing. That was good enough for me.”

Even from the start, though, Marshall was putting her only particular stamp on things. The big hit from her first album was “Birmingham.” a fairly brutal slice of life from the southern United States and she admits that, “I got a lot of shit for it when it first came out,” but it was also the song that Elton John publicly admired, which gave her career a giant boost.

“All along, I wanted my songs to be about things, not just ‘Baby, baby, yeah, yeah!’ It wasn’t important to me to be Madonna. It was important to me to do things than mean something.”

After two highly successful albums in the pop vein, Marshall changed direction to a more R&B oriented sound and more conversational lyrics with “Everybody’s Got a Story”.

The title track, one of her most enduring hits, came about when she actually ad libbed the phrase “Everybody’s got a story that could break your heart,” in conversation and one of her collaborators said: “That’s the kind of s--- you’ve got to write down . . . it speaks to people even when you’re not aware of it.”

Who knows where Marshall would have gone after that, but the next year the battle with her management began and, as she puts it, “what was meant to be a small break turned into a much longer one.”

Marshall claims to be calm about the lower profile she’s had to keep while all the legal hassles continue. “People in my business have a tremendous fear of being forgotten and feel they have to keep putting themselves out there in some capacity. I don’t necessarily buy into that.”

But what about her famous line? Does she have a story that could break our heart?

“Sure, hasn’t everyone? It’s inevitable. If you’re breathing, if you’re living, then something or someone is going to hurt you. But I think that’s what makes you stronger and much more capable of dealing with life.”

Five faves that have influenced Amanda Marshall:

•THE POINTER SISTERS: They were huge in my house when I was growing up and they were the first concert I ever saw, at Massey Hall, when I was 7. I saw them again recently and what struck me was how much I stole from them!

•FAME: That movie was a huge turning point for me. I saw it at the Cinesphere at Ontario Place and, as a kid, it legitimized the idea that pursuing a career in the arts was a noble thing.

•DIONNE FARRIS: Her album Wild Seed, Wild Flower made a huge impression on me. It was hip-hop presented with a rock sensibility and it blew me away.

•PATTI CATHCART: She sang with guitarist Tuck Andress as Tuck and Patti. I knew every one of their records note for note. She was such an amazing improvisationalist, my first exposure to that intimate, smokey, right-on-the-mic kind of thing.

•MAYA ANGELOU: When we had just moved to Halifax and I was feeling pretty miserable, my aunt gave me a copy of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. It transported me and made me feel a lot better about myself.

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